Owen Beattie: Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

Certainly no exemption from scurvy was secured for many of the Arctic expeditions of this era, despite the claims made for the antiscorbutic properties of tinned foods, though in that respect De Long’s seems to have fared better than most. But the ancient scourge now had company from an equally virulent and deadly affliction.

The successes, or more often the failures, of nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions are usually viewed as little more than inventories of the foibles of individual commanders—which, if one believes the usual popular historical appraisals, run the gamut from simple incompetency and benign eccentricity to outright, stark-raving lunacy—squared off against a malignant climate and relentless geography. With hindsight, the decisions made and actions taken by some of those commanders do lend credence to the view that the Arctic heaved with an armada of the reality-challenged. But all that arrogance and misapprehension amounts to little beside one simple fact: that many of those who sailed in search of the passage in the nineteenth century did so with their physical and mental health seriously compromised.

These failures cannot simply be assigned to character in the face of history’s failure to account for a fundamental truth: That at the very moment when explorers sought to conquer the places of greatest extremity, where success relied on every advantage of technology and human ingenuity and when the consequences of failure were so stark and absolute, a new and unanticipated threat to human health had entered the equation. It was a threat absolutely germane to the debate about character, for it also had the effect of subverting and undermining a commander’s mental faculties at the same time as it mugged his body. Yes, the forces of the natural world they encountered were little understood. But even less understood was the “debility” caused by the scorbutic and saturnic diseases that ate away at expedition members, loosening their teeth, blackening their gums, bloating their extremities and clouding their judgment.

The story of how the Royal Navy failed to achieve the Northwest Passage is really that of how the world’s greatest navy battled, and was ultimately humbled by, a simple yet gruesome disease—scurvy, allied to a menace of which they could not begin to conceive: lead poisoning. The source of their defeat was not the ice-choked seas, the deep cold, the winters of absolute night, the labyrinthine geography or the soul-destroying isolation. It was found in their food supply, most notably in their heavy reliance on tinned foods.

The landscape of the Canadian Arctic has changed little in the intervening years. The grey tracts of stone, the relentless, grinding course of the sea ice, the violet hues of the late-setting sun, all are today as they were in Franklin’s time. Adventurers visiting King William and Beechey islands this summer or the next, whether burdened by backpacks or man-hauling sledges in a personal struggle to attain some commonality with a lost world, will find their satisfaction. The romance of the Franklin era of exploration and the emotional response that it evokes is enduring. What is not is the assumption that great men die only of great causes. For despite the hostile forces of climate and geography the region represents, it was something else that had a catastrophic effect on the Franklin expedition—something human.

List of the officers and crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror taken from their Muster Books, 1845. Source: Admiralty Records, Public Record Office.

HMS Erebus

CAPTAIN Sir John Franklin

COMMANDER James Fitzjames

LIEUTENANTS Graham Gore, H.T.D. Le Vesconte, James W. Fairholme

MATES Robert O. Sargent, Charles F. Des Voeux, Edward Couch

SECOND MASTER Henry F. Collins

SURGEON Stephen S. Stanley

ACTING ASSISTANT-SURGEON Harry D.S. Goodsir

PAYMASTER AND PURSER Charles H. Osmer

ACTING MASTER James Reid

WARRANT OFFICERS John Gregory (engineer), Thomas Terry (boatswain), John Weekes (carpenter)

PETTY OFFICERS Philip Reddington (captain of the forecastle), Thomas Watson (carpenter’s mate), John Murray (sailmaker), James W. Brown (caulker), William Smith (blacksmith), Samuel Brown (boatswain’s mate), Richard Wall (cook), James Rigden (captain’s coxswain), John Sullivan (captain of the maintop), Robert Sinclair (captain of the foretop), Joseph Andrews (captain of the hold), Edmund Hoar (captain’s steward), Richard Aylmore (gunroom steward), Daniel Arthur (quartermaster), John Downing (quartermaster), William Bell (quartermaster), Francis Dunn (caulker’s mate), William Fowler (paymaster and purser’s steward), John Bridgens (subordinate officers’ steward), James Hart (leading stoker), John Cowie (stoker), Thomas Plater (stoker)

ABLE SEAMEN Henry Lloyd, John Stickland, Thomas Hartnell, JOHN HARTNELL, George Thompson, William Orren, Charles Coombs, William Closson, William Mark, Thomas Work, Charles Best, George Williams, John Morfin, Thomas Tadman, Abraham Seely, Thomas McConvey, Robert Ferrier, Josephus Geater, Robert Johns, Francis Pocock

ROYAL MARINES David Bryant (sergeant), Alexander Paterson (corporal), Joseph Healey (private), WILLIAM BRAINE (private), William Reed (private), Robert Hopcraft (private), William Pilkington (private)

BOYS George Chambers, David Young

HMS Terror

CAPTAIN Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier

LIEUTENANTS Edward Little, John Irving, George H. Hodgson

MATES Robert Thomas, Frederick John Hornby

SECOND MASTER Gillies A. Macbean

SURGEON John S. Peddie

ASSISTANT SURGEON Alexander MacDonald

CLERK-IN-CHARGE E.J.H. Helpman

ACTING MASTER Thomas Blanky

WARRANT OFFICERS Thomas Honey (carpenter), John Lane (boatswain), James Thompson (engineer)

PETTY OFFICERS Reuben Male (captain of the forecastle), Thomas Johnson (boatswain’s mate), JOHN TORRINGTON (leading stoker), Alexander Wilson (carpenter’s mate), David MacDonald (quartermaster), William Rhodes (quartermaster), John Kenley (quartermaster), Thomas Darlington (caulker), John Diggle (cook), Thomas Farr (captain of the maintop), Henry Peglar (captain of the foretop), John Wilson (captain’s coxswain), Samuel Honey (blacksmith), William Goddard (captain of the hold), Thomas Jopson (captain’s steward), Thomas Armitage (gunroom steward), Cornelius Hickey (caulker’s mate), Edward Genge (paymaster’s steward), William Gibson (subordinate officers’ steward), Luke Smith (stoker), William Johnson (stoker)

ABLE SEAMEN George Cann, William Shanks, David Sims, William Sinclair, William Jerry, Henry Sait, Alexander Berry, John Bailey, Samuel Crispe, John Bates, William Wentzall, William Strong, John Handford, Charles Johnson, David Leys, George Kinnaird, Magnus Manson, James Walker, Edwin Laurence

ROYAL MARINES Solomon Tozer (sergeant), William Hedges (corporal), Henry Wilks (private), John Hammond (private), James Daly (private), William Heather (private)

BOYS Robert Golding, Thomas Evans

Four crewmen who returned to Britain on the Barretto Junior and the Rattler before the Erebus and Terror entered the Arctic: Thomas Burt (armourer), John Brown (able seaman), James Elliot (sailmaker), William Aitken (Royal Marine private)

Major expeditions involved in the search for HMS Erebus and HMS Terror:

1846–47 Dr. John Rae (overland)

1847–49 Sir John Richardson and Dr. John Rae (overland)

1848–49 Captain Sir James Clark Ross, Captain E.J. Bird (HMS Enterprise & HMS Investigator)

1848–50 Captain Henry Kellett (HMS Herald)

1848–52 Captain Thomas Moore (HMS Plover)